I am an entrepreneur and communications expert from Salt Lake City and founder of SnappConner PR. I am the author of Beyond PR: Communicate Like A Champ The Digital Age, available on Amazon. I am also a frequent author and speaker on communication and am co-creator of the Content University program for executives. The opinions I express (especially when tongue in cheek) are entirely my own. My newsletter is the Snappington Post, available at http://bit.ly/1iv67Wk

Business Advice From A Winter Games Champion: Paralympics Hero Bonnie St. John

1984 Paralympics medalist,speaker, author and businesswoman, Bonnie St. John

“What you do when everything goes right doesn’t tell me who you are. It’s what you do after disaster that shows your character most.” – Medalist, Rhodes Scholar and Businesswoman Bonnie St. John

As Olympic Fever deepens in the days leading up to the 2014 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, a champion from Winter Games past caught my eye: Bonnie St. John. St. John made her initial mark as a champion in the 1984 Paralympics as the second-fastest female amputee skier in the world and the world’s first African-American ski medalist.

St John lost her right leg at age 5, due to a rare condition that stunted its growth. Her reaction to placing second in her 1984 race is famous enough to have found its way onto Starbucks Cups in the company’s 2006 “The Way I See It” campaign: “I was ahead in the slalom, but in the second run, everyone fell on a dangerous spot. I was beaten by a woman who got up faster than I did. I learned that people fall down, winners get up, and gold medal winners just get up faster.”

St. John returned to the 2002 Winter Games as a featured speaker in the opening ceremonies, held in my own regional hometown of Salt Lake. Recently Success Magazine featured St. John for her post athletic endeavors: graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, a Rhodes Scholarship for economics and graduate degree from Oxford has worked in the White House and has written six books. For the past 20 years her business has provided leadership consulting and keynote presentations for organizations including FedEx, Shell, Disney, AT&T, Merck and Target.

Clearly St. John is a successful entrepreneur. Intrigued, I traced her down and obtained an interview with her this week on the phone. Today she is at work on curriculums for leadership development and on a seventh book, on resilience that is due to hit the market in 2015. (She wrote her sixth book, “How Great Women Lead”, in 2012, with her teenage daughter.)

Today Bonnie St. John is competing in business. (image courtesy of BonnieStJohn.com)

I was also fascinated to learn that she recently played a role counseling amputees after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing to help them prepare for the next phases of their new lives. She also supported some of them in Colorado as they learned to ski alongside Wounded Warriors and Paralympic hopefuls.

As I spoke with St. John, she agreed heartily that the similarities between champion athletes – and perhaps disabled athletics in particular – are profound. “As entrepreneurs, you need to go out and compete at the highest level, but you don’t have everything you would like to have,” she remarked. “You don’t get ideal equipment to fit you. Costs are tight. You get thrown into situations you can’t anticipate. You have to innovate and persevere.”

Here are the top four issues she noted, as a message to Forbes’ Entrepreneurs on the skills they need most:

Relentless focus on a big goal. “I was fairly young when I learned to ski and realized I could be pretty good,” she said. “So I set my sights on going all the way to the Olympics. That drove me, and gave me a real fire. When I was waiting tables in Colorado, I wasn’t just a ‘ski bum’ – I was making my way to the U.S. team. That big goal made even the little things meaningful.” “Starting a business is always hard. When I left President Clinton’s economic team, I began working as a writer and speaker and got pregnant with my daughter. I no longer had an office in the White House. So I needed to be relentless again, towards another really big goal—to help the best get even better in Corporate America.”

Have a Strategy. “You need a good strategy in addition to an audacious goal. For me as an athlete it was getting more days on the snow and getting access to really good coaches. I had to move from San Diego, had to raise money and over the Summer I had to live on a glacier to train. I think one of the reasons I won was that I had learned to organize myself better than my competitors in taking the initiative to advance myself, hire coaches, figure out how I was going to make it all happen. It was great training for becoming an entrepreneur—you have to wear all of the hats. You have to recruit people, train them, and organize yourself and your team to make something great happen.”

Pure Hard Work. “You learn this principle in sports and you rely on it as an entrepreneur. I had to ski at temperatures that were sometimes 50 below zero. There’s not much to like about living in a glacier over the summer. In Colorado, I used to walk a mile to work in the morning at 5:00 a.m. That’s how I supported myself as an athlete. Entrepreneurship is like that as well: you can’t hire people to do all the things you’d like to do. That is a luxury you may have in a larger organization, but you don’t get the luxury of saying ‘That’s not my job’ in a start-up.”

Adaptability. “I particularly love the word ‘adaptable’ because it includes both innovation and perseverance. You have to innovate. You’ve heard the Einstein quote about insanity, yes? Well I have the audacity to update Einstein. In today’s world, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same result. You can’t do the same thing you did last year and expect it to work. Things change. I have to keep reinventing myself and adapting my business. Over the years I’ve added services beyond keynote speaking like leadership training, facilitating global conferences, and writing books. Right now I’m working on a ‘train the trainer’ program on resilience that includes a personal app. You need to constantly be pushing the envelope, growing, developing and remaining agile. You learn those skills in sports, and you continue to use them as an entrepreneur.”

St. John notes that she didn’t always know she’d be a champion skier, but a part of her has always known she would be an entrepreneur. She majored in economics, noting the way value is created in the global economy has always been a fascinating subject for her. In high school she took courses in how to launch a business. She’s also been highly competitive for all of her life, which helped to fuel her avid interest in sports.

“I’ve had the opportunity to participate at world-class levels in so many arenas—sports, politics, academics and business—to work with the top leaders on Wall Street. Global political leaders. Top athletes. I love excellence and I love competition. To see it from so many sides is fascinating to me.”

I can imagine her presence was hugely inspiring to the amputees she counseled in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bomb.

My final question to St. John had to do with the champions I’ve been watching in the final pre-Olympic competitions from the preparation facilities that still remain in Park City, just outside of Salt Lake. I’ve been very much struck by the intensity of all of the athletes preparing, knowing that only a select few will get to represent the U.S. in Sochi. What would her words of advice be to those who don’t make the cut? She doesn’t hesitate in her answer: “Nothing is wasted. Our hard work builds our character, our strengths and our opportunities. What matters is what you do next.”

And she envisions these athletes—all of them—as a tier of tremendous new entrepreneurs. After all, “no one knows how to fail more or better than an Olympic athlete,” she maintains. “What you do when everything goes right doesn’t tell me who you are. It’s what you do after disaster that really shows your character. Not making the Olympic team. Losing a leg. Or having a market dry up that you were invested in. What are you going to do next?”

I hope to be hearing much more from Bonnie St. John in the future. She’ll be watching the 2014 Games with particular interest. For those who would like to learn more about St. John or who would like to reach out to her directly, you can reach her via her personal and business website at www.bonniestjohn.com.

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Comments

I love this. What a very inspiring, enlightened individual. I’m always amazed at how much more focused and driven people like Bonnie are than those who appear to have the advantage of not having these kinds of challenges to face. Adversity has its benefits when viewed with the right perspective.

Hey, Tom, thanks for your note. Isn’t she a great one? I’m going to remember this interview the next time I’m tempted to complain about anything. And she came to the interview fully prepared in advance… I’m impressed.

Me too, Cheryl. Too often I find myself grumbling because someone let me down or didn’t keep their word, etc. Bah! People like Bonnie make me realize how petty my thinking is along those lines. Learn from it and move on! That’s the spirit.

I was definitely impressed. Had the chance to speak with her husband a bit over email as well, after the article was complete – they work together (and of course her daughter worked with her as a co-book author as well). Loved that, too. Thanks, Devin!